“Pope calls for global government,” read the headlines in early July. Then, as night follows day, the Pope’s conservative supporters lined up to eviscerate the media for distorting the Pope’s meaning. Those darn liberals—how dare they twist the Pontiff’s words like that.

This is not exactly the first time such a thing has taken place. The pattern, over the past couple of decades, runs as follows: the media more or less accurately portrays something the Pope said or did, and then his conservative supporters, anxious to explain away these unusual statements and activities, devise convoluted explanations as to what the Pope really meant.

It is worth reproducing the relevant passage of the Pope’s new encyclical, Caritas in Veritate:

In the face of the unrelenting growth of global interdependence, there is a strongly felt need, even in the midst of a global recession, for a reform of the United Nations Organization, and likewise of economic institutions and international finance, so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth. One also senses the urgent need to find innovative ways of implementing the principle of the responsibility to protect and of giving poorer nations an effective voice in shared decision-making. This seems necessary in order to arrive at a political, juridical and economic order which can increase and give direction to international cooperation for the development of all peoples in solidarity. To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration: for all this, there is urgent need of a true world political authority, as my predecessor Blessed John XXIII indicated some years ago. Such an authority would need to be regulated by law, to observe consistently the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity, to seek to establish the common good, and to make a commitment to securing authentic integral human development inspired by the values of charity in truth. Furthermore, such an authority would need to be universally recognized and to be vested with the effective power to ensure security for all, regard for justice, and respect for rights. Obviously it would have to have the authority to ensure compliance with its decisions from all parties, and also with the coordinated measures adopted in various international forums. Without this, despite the great progress accomplished in various sectors, international law would risk being conditioned by the balance of power among the strongest nations. The integral development of peoples and international cooperation require the establishment of a greater degree of international ordering, marked by subsidiarity, for the management of globalization. They also require the construction of a social order that at last conforms to the moral order, to the interconnection between moral and social spheres, and to the link between politics and the economic and civil spheres, as envisaged by the Charter of the United Nations. [emphases in original; internal endnotes removed]

Whatever we may say about this passage, was it really so unreasonable for reporters to have interpreted it as they did?

I actually didn’t want to write anything about the Pope’s encyclical. In 2007, I wrote a book, Sacred Then and Sacred Now: The Return of the Old Latin Mass, in defense of the Pope’s restoration of the traditional Latin liturgy, an area in which Benedict XVI is quite knowledgeable and has much of value to say. I like this Pope. He is smart and serious, not frivolous or vain. He is in many ways a substantial improvement over his predecessor. (I cite as evidence the very fact that the media believes the opposite.) And having been viciously denounced and ridiculed by some pretty despicable people, he certainly has all the right enemies.

I have reluctantly yielded to the urging of quite a few correspondents and typed up a few thoughts. So here goes: Caritas in Veritate strikes me as at best a relatively unremarkable restatement of some familiar themes from previous social encyclicals. At worst, it is bewilderingly naïve, and its policy recommendations, while attracting no one to the Church, are certain to repel.

The response to the encyclical throughout the right-of-center Catholic world was drearily predictable: with few exceptions, it was a performance worthy of the Soviet Politburo, with unrestrained huzzahs everywhere.

It is one thing to receive a statement from the Pope with the respect that is due to the man and his office. It is quite another to treat his every missive as ipso facto brilliant, as if the Catholic faith depended on it. If his supporters are trying to live down to the Left’s portrayal of Catholicism as a billion-person cult, they could hardly do a better job.

The Pope Is Not an Absolute Monarch

My book The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economymakes a distinction between those aspects of economics that fall within the Pope’s purview as a teacher of faith and morals and those that do not. I’ll repeat that thesis here as a prelude to my comments. (Anyone who already gets this can skip this section.)
The phenomena that economics touches upon, which include money, banking, exchange, prices, wages, monopoly theory, and many other topics, are replete with moral significance. But the positive, scientific statements about these phenomena that constitute the discipline of economics are necessarily value neutral. (By “scientific” I mean only that they involve causal relationships, not that economics is or should resemble one of the physical sciences.) Describing the workings of fractional-reserve banking is a positive task, not a normative one. Discussing whether such a system is desirable is a normative task, and qualitatively separate from explaining the mechanics of that system. One cannot make an intelligent comment about the former unless he understands the latter, and it is the latter with which economics, properly understood, concerns itself.

Likewise, economic policy may possess a moral dimension, but not a single proposition of economic theory involves a moral claim. For example, Frank Knight conceived of capital as a homogeneous unit whose individual processes occurred synchronously, and therefore could be understood without introducing time into capital theory. F.A. Hayek, as well as the Austrian School of economics to which Hayek belonged, conceives of capital as a series of time-consuming stages of higher and lower order, with the highest-order stages the ones most remote from consumers (mining and raw materials, for instance) and the lowest-order stage immediately preceding the sale of the finished product.

Nothing in the Deposit of Faith even comes close to deciding this and countless other important economic questions one way or the other. Not even the most uncomprehending or exaggerated rendering of papal infallibility would have the Pope adjudicating such disputes as these. Yet misunderstandings or ignorance regarding such seemingly abstruse points are so often at the heart of the policy recommendations that bishops’ conferences propose and papal encyclicals can seem to imply.

It is obviously not “dissent” merely to observe that the cause-and-effect relationships that constitute the theoretical edifice of economics are not a matter of faith and morals. They simply do not fall within the range of subjects on which a Catholic prelate is endowed with special insight or authority. Catholic laity cannot head up petition drives against them. They are facts of life. Facts cannot be protested, defied, or lectured to; they can only be learned and acted upon. There is no use in shaking our fists at the fact that price controls lead to shortages. All we can do is understand the phenomenon, and be sure to bear it and other economic truths in mind if we want to make statements about the economy that are rational and useful.

Moreover, those who posture as defenders of Catholic social teaching by and large do not acknowledge that the proposals they implicitly or explicitly advance could have anything but favorable consequences for all. No trade-offs (between higher wages and unemployment, for example) are considered. Naturally, no room for objections can exist when the very possibility of objection is foreclosed by the way the argument is framed: for example, if we want higher wages, we simply demand them. Anyone who does not join in this demand must not want higher wages. This begs the question, of course, since whether high wages can be produced by man’s ipse dixit, rather than through capital accumulation, is precisely the matter at issue.

For instance, the idea of a “living wage” for heads of households is an example of a policy I would institute only if, (1) I did not understand what factors lead real wages to rise on their own, without the use or threat of violence; or (2) I wanted to hurt people by making them less employable. (Why not offer a living wage of $10,000,000 per hour, if it’s so easy to raise wages by fiat?) I lack the space to defend this claim here, so I refer interested readers to my chapter on the subject in a book called Catholic Social Teaching and the Market Economy, published by London’s Institute of Economic Affairs in 2007 and available for free download.

It is certainly possible, though very unlikely, for a Catholic to reply this way: the Church insists that the living wage and whatever else must be instituted because justice demands them, even though they will make people, particularly those they were designed to help, materially worse off. However, no ecclesiastical document I have ever seen has taken this position. These documents carry the assumption that their suggestions will accomplish their stated ends and increase people’s well-being. That assumption, in turn, implies that the only thing standing between today and a more prosperous future is sufficient political will rather than constraints imposed by the very nature of things. And that merely assumes the very thing that needs to be proven.

It begs the question yet again to declare that authority has spoken and the matter is closed—the very matter at issue is whether these subjects are of a qualitative nature to be susceptible of ecclesiastical resolution in the first place. If the law of returns, for instance, is an objective fact of nature (which it is), then the Pope himself cannot declare it to be false, or expect success from policy prescriptions that ignore it, any more than he can fashion a square circle. It is no insult to papal authority to exclude the possibility of square circles. (As a matter of fact, leaving aside the famous and oft-misunderstood dissent of St. Peter Damian, the consensus among the Scholastics before the triumph of nominalism was that God himself could not violate the law of non-contradiction—by, say, creating a square circle.)

It is one thing, for example, to identify the well-being of the family as an important ingredient of a healthy society. It is quite another to propose specific policy measures designed to help families, since whether these policies will have their intended effect involves causal analysis, which, it should be unnecessary to point out, is analytically separate from faith and morals. Surely some matters are to be left to the laity to discuss and determine among themselves.

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Pope Paul VI’s Advice for the Developing World

Pope Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio (1967), for example, went beyond the moral observations one might make about Third World development to actually offering policy prescriptions, thereby putting Catholics in the unfair position of appearing to “dissent” from the Pope when proposing alternatives. Peter Bauer, the prophetic development economist who warned for decades about the harmful effects that Western aid programs would have, noted that there was nothing particularly Catholic or even Christian about the document, and that it merely repeated, with some religious overtones, the conventional wisdom.

We now know how disastrous Populorum’s advice was: the aid entrenched the worst regimes and indefinitely delayed necessary reforms, and it tore a dozen countries apart as various ethnic and racial groups descended into violence as they tried to grab hold of a share of the grant money. The very idea of foreign aid introduced perverse incentives into these societies; it now made less sense to create things that please your fellow man and more sense to devote unproductive effort to campaigns to get aid money for yourself. (I review the subject in more detail in The Church and the Market and cover the literature in 33 Questions About American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask.) Hong Kong, Chile, and South Korea, on the other hand, became prosperous after aid was discontinued and they were forced to adopt sensible and sane economic policies.

Paul VI also adopted the fashionable Prebisch/Singer thesis that a secular deterioration in the terms of trade between the developed and the developing world, to the disadvantage of the latter, was bound to emerge in light of the supposed tendency of manufactured goods to rise in price while the prices of commodities (in which developing countries tended to concentrate) fell. In fact, the alleged deterioration in the terms of trade never occurred, as Gottfried Haberler was already arguing ten years before Populorum Progressio, if anyone was bothering to listen. Yet it was on these faulty grounds that Paul VI then proceeded to discourage free trade as a path to prosperity for the developing world. (I realize some readers of this site may oppose free trade, but the conservative argument against it is that it allegedly hurts the rich country and benefits the poor country—surely we concede that someone benefits from free trade, right?) Countries that have followed that advice have lagged far behind those that have integrated themselves into the international division of labor. There is no denying this.

Was it “dissent” to have observed that the Pope’s factual error about the terms of trade was indeed a factual error? Was it “dissent” to have pointed out that these recommendations would not have their intended effect? Were we to believe that the Pope’s authority over faith and morals extended also to cause-and-effect analysis applied to international development aid. These questions should answer themselves.

Pope Benedict XVI on Foreign Aid

By the 1980s and 1990s, the consensus among observers of all kinds was that Bauer had been vindicated, and that these programs had indeed done more harm than good. Even the most intractable opponents of common sense, like the New York Times and the International Monetary Fund, were forced to this conclusion. And yet we read, in 2009, in Pope Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate:

In the search for solutions to the current economic crisis, development aid for poor countries must be considered a valid means of creating wealth for all. What aid programme is there that can hold out such significant growth prospects—even from the point of view of the world economy—as the support of populations that are still in the initial or early phases of economic development? From this perspective, more economically developed nations should do all they can to allocate larger portions of their gross domestic product to development aid, thus respecting the obligations that the international community has undertaken in this regard. [emphasis in original]

All right, I’ll say it: this is wrong in every respect. However well intentioned it may be, it is absolutely wrong. We can express our unhappiness with statements like this as respectfully and non-flippantly as possible, but to remain silent about them leaves the false impression to potential converts that they would be committed to obviously debatable propositions like these should they choose to enter the fold.

In the wake of the new encyclical’s release I came across a few disparaging references by conservative Catholics to Paul VI and Populorum Progressio, against which these critics (rather implausibly, in my view) wished to contrast the more sober and sensible Caritas in Veritate. What’s interesting about this is that I don’t recall any of these critics, some of whom were alive during Paul’s pontificate, offering such remarks at that time. But if Populorum’s advice is ill considered to the point of having been refuted by experience by 2009, then it was at least open to discussion in 1967. Where was that discussion? Why is Populorum being critically examined only now, after the damage has been done?

Now I repeat: only the most uncomprehending or superstitious Catholic would think the Pope’s authority over faith and morals granted him some kind of magical insight into the best model to pursue for Third World development. Were that true, then economics in general and development economics in particular should be abandoned immediately, since simple inquiries with the Pope would yield all the answers we might need.

This is why Pope Leo XIII once declared,

If I were to pronounce on any single matter of a prevailing economic problem, I should be interfering with the freedom of men to work out their own affairs. Certain cases must be solved in the domain of facts, case by case as they occur…. [M]en must realize in deeds those things, the principles of which have been placed beyond dispute…. [T]hese things one must leave to the solution of time and experience.

Sins of Omission

In addition to some of its more unfortunate statements, Caritas in Veritate is also a gigantic missed opportunity. There are legitimate moral concerns to be raised about the structure of the world’s monetary systems, but Benedict XVI does not discuss them.

If those moral concerns interest you, I suggest Jörg Guido Hülsmann’s brilliant work The Ethics of Money Production, or my The Church and the Market. (The former title was greeted with great enthusiasm in The Wanderer by Paul Likoudis, a good man whom I would classify as a third-way distributist of some sort, so its appeal extends well beyond the usual Misesian circles.) Hülsmann shows that within Catholic tradition there is ample testimony to the wickedness of monetary debasement, fractional-reserve banking, and numerous other institutional commonplaces we hardly give a second thought. As Hülsmann argues, there is no moral or economic case for the monetary system under which we are forced to live—a system that has never been introduced voluntarily but has always been enforced by violence, with the police empowered to suppress alternatives. The insidious nature of the government’s monopoly on money becomes even clearer when a currency degenerates into hyperinflation, all known examples of which have occurred under monopoly fiat-money systems. Short of a completely state-run system, it is as far from a free market as one can imagine.

The system we have now involves a government-privileged central bank with a monopoly on the creation of legal-tender money, charged with watching over a cartel of ostensibly private but also state-privileged commercial banks. Its debasement of money makes it very difficult for people to save for the future without having to become speculators of one kind or another. A hard-money system, on the other hand, permitted the average person to save for the future simply by accumulating precious-metal coins, which, back in the days when they served as money, held or increased their value over time. Who today would save for the future by piling up Federal Reserve Notes? Society’s most vulnerable now must enter the stock market or take other kinds of risks just to hold on to their wealth. Is this not a moral issue?

The present system gives rise to the business cycle when it attempts to push interest rates below their free-market level. The resulting discoördination within the structure of production puts the economy on a path it cannot follow indefinitely. The bust then throws countless households into turmoil, and inevitably encourages the most despicable, predatory behavior on the part of firms seeking bailouts.

The monopoly central bank institutionalizes the problem of moral hazard. There is no physical limitation on the creation of additional paper money. For that reason, major market actors know there is no physical constraint on bailing them out in emergencies. The only obstacle, easily conquered, is one of political will. It should be obvious enough how a system like this both promotes an artificially elevated level of risk tolerance and benefits the already privileged at the expense of the average person.
All of these arguments and others besides are developed in more detail in Hülsmann’s book and in my own Meltdown and The Church and the Market. The encyclical unfortunately neglects these moral problems in favor of what strike me as platitudinous warnings about materialism and greed that I might encounter in secular form in any mainstream publication you care to name. Had the Pope instead raised the serious moral concerns I have outlined here, he would have lent his prestige to jump-starting a long-overdue examination of financial practices we have long taken for granted. Instead, although Benedict XVI surely would not think of it this way, the encyclical by and large told the Powers That Be what they wanted to hear: materialism and greed need to be kept in check by economic planners and stabilizers. (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? one wonders.) In other words, the regrettably conventional recommendation of Caritas in Veritate appears to be closer regulation of the existing system.

Because these institutional factors are neglected, moreover, the encyclical lacks any systematic comprehension of business cycles, which by clear implication the reader is left to believe are caused by the aggregate sum of individual acts of wickedness. The interesting question—namely, why these acts of wickedness should occur in sudden, cyclical clusters—is not raised.

What, then, is a Catholic to do? There is no need to provide chapter and verse to the effect that the Pope is not (and was never thought of as) an absolute monarch whose every utterance is to be greeted with obsequious flattery. Any educated Catholic knows this. Throughout the vast bulk of Church history, the cult of personality—let’s call it what it was—that surrounded Pope John Paul II would have struck Catholics as downright bizarre.

St. Thomas Aquinas contended that a layman may rebuke his prelate, even publicly, if the latter is giving scandal. Under the heading “Whether a man is bound to correct his prelate,” St. Thomas writes: “It must be observed, however, that if the faith were endangered, a subject ought to rebuke his prelate even publicly. Hence Paul, who was Peter’s subject, rebuked him in public, on account of the imminent danger of scandal concerning faith.”

Now again, I like Benedict XVI, and I believe he has made important changes for the better in the life of the Church. But certain key passages of Caritas in Veritate, in addition to being unhelpful or ill considered, erect gratuitous obstacles to conversion on the part of countless Protestants and other non-Catholics. If St. Thomas’ counsel does not apply in this case, where would it apply?

Wonkette, if you have the good fortune of not knowing, is a left-liberal site that manages to consider itself cheeky and iconoclastic while endorsing only the most exquisitely conventional, establishment-approved opinions. If you’re not located somewhere along that fantastic spectrum of genius that ranges from Chuck Schumer to Arlen Specter, Wonkette will expose you to the world as the misanthropic imbecile you obviously are.

In order to remain as predictable as possible, Wonkette’s writers have decided they really don’t like Rep. Michele Bachmann, member of Congress from Minnesota. Of all the geniuses in Congress, they select for special ridicule one of the tiny handful who actually ask an interesting question now and again. By “interesting” I mean the kind of question no one at Newsweek, MSNBC, or, for that matter, Wonkette itself, would think to ask. That’s not because these questions are stupid; it’s because they’re not designed to flatter our overlords, portray them as indispensable, or show them the kind of reverence that Pravda once displayed for the Politburo.

Thus, for example, when 60 Minutesinterviewed Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke several months ago, the questions were on the order of “What are the dangers now? What keeps you up at night?” Now there are some classic Wonkette questions. Instead of asking how this guy could have been so wrong about practically everything he’s said since 2006—e.g., there’s no housing bubble, lending standards are sound, the housing bust should be over by December 2008—the establishment left wants to know what is troubling our great overlord, and how he intends to use his potions and incantations to slay the evils that afflict us.

But back to Rep. Bachmann. One reason Wonkette doesn’t like her is that she once asked Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner where he got the constitutional authority to do the things he’s doing. You might think so-called “progressives” would be interested in that question. Once upon a time, progressives grew suspicious when government officials shoveled money to the richest people in the country, and had enough common sense not to accept the official rationales at face value. Surely this is an area in which the real left and the real right might join in happy concord, no? I mean, the left coined the phrase question authority, right?

As it turns out, they really meant question authority except the Treasury secretary in a Democratic administration, or the Fed chairman, or the Washington Post, or the bipartisan foreign-policy consensus, or the regulatory establishment, or Paul Krugman, or the SEC, or the medical establishment, or the central bank, or the Officially Approved Version of American History you were taught in fourth grade. These are wonderful people and institutions, citizen. They exist to protect you. Yes, yes, question authority and all that, but none of that applies to people and institutions that exist for your own good. You would have to be deranged and anti-social to oppose them. Why, you’re not deranged and anti-social, are you?

Listen to Geithner’s answers for yourself. You can learn a lot about the Wonkette people by grasping that they consider these to be good answers, indeed so good that only a blockhead would be unsatisfied by them. Bachmann is asking where in the Constitution the authority comes from for the Treasury and the Fed to be taking over companies and engaging in the bailouts. Geithner replies that they are acting in accordance with legislation passed by Congress. Exactly how smart do you need to be to recognize that that is not even close to an answer to the question? Geithner then says something about “the laws of the land”—again, perfectly irrelevant. Where in the Constitution does this authority come from? An answer to that question is not even attempted.

So the Treasury secretary has no idea where the authority comes from to bail out some of the most reckless, idiotic, parasitic parties on Wall Street, and Wonkette thinks the person to condemn here is not the Treasury secretary himself but the member of Congress who corners him? Can you imagine the contempt in which a genuine progressive like Robert La Follette would have held these establishment hangers-on?

Wonkette also doesn’t like Rep. Bachmann because she’s interested in the Austrian School of economics, a subject about which they’ve collectively read half an entry at Wikipedia. That the Austrians predicted the current crisis at a time when Wonkette’s heroes were calling for the very policies that brought on the collapse (and yes, that includes Paul Krugman, his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding) impresses them not a whit. The Austrians, who constitute the oldest continuously existing school of economic thought in the world, are out of favor with the establishment, whose boots it refuses to lick, and that’s pretty much all Wonkette needs to know.

Even worse, and according to the article her worst offense, is that Rep. Bachmann has been learning this material recently, and other people have been glad that a member of Congress is showing interest in business cycle theory—a subject that is probably not at the very top of the reading lists of Chris Dodd or John McCain. Now you can understand Wonkette’s ridicule, right? She has attended lectures on the subject and read books. (What is that in your hand, citizen? A book?) We can’t have that—the most urgent need right now is for American congressmen to keep their present level of knowledge right where it is.

In particular, Rep. Bachmann has been reading my book Meltdown, which gives the free-market reply to the drones who tell us the crisis was caused by the “free market” and “deregulation.” Ron Paul, who wrote the book’s foreword, invited me to discuss it before a small group of congressmen in his office several months ago.

Now we really can’t have that. Why, this is an unapproved opinion! And since no one at Wonkette is familiar with Austrian business cycle theory, which pinpoints the roots of the boom-bust business cycle outside the boundaries of the free market, it can’t possibly amount to much. If it did, they’d already know about it. QED.

Perhaps indicative of the intelligence of Wonkette readers are the comments that follow. One chap writes, “Is Austrian Economic theory the one where they march in wearing brownshirts and take all the businesses from the Jews? Laissez-faire, uber alles!” In case you think that’s a moronic remark that no conscious person would utter, or a stupid and blockheaded smear of an entire country, recall that people who live in Austria are Officially Designated Oppressors who can be smeared and insulted in perpetuity, without provoking the sensitivity sessions, candlelight vigils, and all-around tears and sorrow that accompany insults to other groups. Wonkette, natch, will decide for us which groups belong to which categories.

Piling on a bit, if I may, consider that the greatest of the Austrian economists, Ludwig von Mises, was a Jew who was forced to flee Nazi-controlled Europe, arriving in the United States in 1940 almost empty-handed. The Nazis, who destroyed his library and papers, detested him because his message of freedom and the international division of labor was rather at odds with the autarkic, controlled economy of National Socialism. So the least we might say is that our friend’s Nazi joke doesn’t really work. He doesn’t strike me as the thirsting-for-knowledge sort, though, so I rather doubt he’ll one day come upon the truth and feel embarrassed.

The George W. Bush years were such an ordeal that I actually remember thinking that the left wasn’t all bad. With a few honorable exceptions, though, they are what they have always been: anti-intellectual apologists for the status quo masquerading as “agents of change.” They claim to be antiwar but make excuses for people who vote the funds for war. They claim to oppose the neoconservatives but happily applaud when their cult leader surrounds himself with them, and seem untroubled when Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol declares, in response to the president’s policy on Afghanistan, “All hail Obama!” And they’re all tears and pity for average Americans, while at the same time demonizing people who think there might be something a teensy weensy bit not-progressive about creating trillions of dollars and throwing it at the financial elite.

The Wonkette kids are like the popular group in high school that wanted to belong to the fashionable causes, since that’s what the other popular kids did, but made sure they weren’t too ostentatious in their devotion to those causes. We can’t be too different, you understand. Just cool. Just different enough to be able to sneer at the rest of mankind and its stupid, unenlightened opinions, but not so different that we won’t get invited to cocktail parties at the homes of people who matter.

After eight years of watching conservatives blow trillions of dollars and comport themselves like anti-intellectual, jingoistic blockheads, I found myself ashamed to admit that the Left seemed to have all the genuine intellectuals—people who seemed to possess real curiosity, who refused to accept whatever official line the government was shelling out, and who sought genuine understanding instead of name-calling and pointless vitriol.

With the Left now in power, though, they’ve by and large reverted to form. The very same people who just a year ago prided themselves on evaluating every Pentagon press release with an air of suspicion and hostility now accept without cavil whatever the Federal Reserve chairman or the Treasury secretary tell them. They’ll believe whatever economic superstition, no matter how transparently ludicrous, that happens to be in fashion. Whatever happened to “Question Authority”?

Air America host Thom Hartmann is a perfect example. His article on the economic crisis posted at the Huffington Post gets pretty much everything dead wrong, and yet his point of view is by and large the conventional wisdom.

Now I’m sporting enough to look past the fact that Hartmann makes two spelling errors in a single economist’s name. Still, color me skeptical that Hartmann knows a blessed thing about the work of F.A. Hayek. (I assume he thinks these people are more or less interchangeable, that Mises = Friedman = Summers = Rubin, that Mises wouldn’t have denounced at least several of these figures, and that the differences between them are probably just trivial and not worth mentioning.)

Quiz time, Thom! Name one book on economic theory (so The Road to Serfdom, if you happen to have heard of it, doesn’t count) Hayek wrote that you’ve read, flipped through, held in your hand, or even heard of. Stumped? How about one article? Stumped again? Then why not do the decent and honorable thing and shut up until you can speak from authority rather than prejudice and ignorance? Sound fair?

Actually, Thom, I’ll be even more sporting. You can start condemning them again once you can at least competently summarize what someone who has read them tells you they say. How’s that?

Hilariously, then, Hartmann lumps Mises and Hayek in with Alan Greenspan, the so-called free-marketeer who thinks we need a Soviet commissar (namely himself) to plan money and interest rates. Um, Thom, Mises and Hayek opposed central banking altogether, arguing that it was not only a superfluous intervention into the market economy but also that it was destabilizing and the source of the boom-bust cycle. These men are supposed to be similar to Greenspan how, exactly? Can I take a wild guess that you’re out of your depth here, Thom, and therefore simply making things up?

I’ve summarized the Mises-Hayek position elsewhere (flip to page 13 here, for instance, or see Meltdown, my recently released book on what caused the crisis and why the free market is not the cause but the solution). In a nutshell, the point is that when the government’s central bank intervenes in the economy to push interest rates lower than the free market would have set them, the result of its tampering is a massive cluster of errors (to use Lionel Robbins’ phrase) on the part of investors and consumers alike. It goes without saying that a government central bank’s intervention into the market to push interest rates lower than the free market would have set them cannot, by definition, be the fault of the free market. The problems Hartmann identifies in his article, as well as the ones he neglects or doesn’t know about, are mere symptoms of a more fundamental cause, namely the creation of cheap credit by the Fed. Whatever happened to leftists’ interest in “root causes”?

This raises another issue about Hartmann’s piece: not a single word about the Federal Reserve System, as if it played no role at all in the crisis. Not one word! Is Hartmann actually ignorant of the Fed’s role? Does he, as I suspect, actually defend the Fed?

How I’d love to hear Thom’s defense of the Fed as a progressive institution. That would be rich. Here’s the guy who claims to oppose the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, and yet that is precisely what the Cantillon effects of expansionary monetary policy do. It’s also what the Fed’s role as “lender of last resort” does. If Hartmann thinks that power is exercised in defense of the little guy, he is hopeless. Hopeless with an exponent beside it.

Now I know you’re waiting with bated breath to know about Hartmann’s take on the S&L fiasco of the 1980s. What laser beam of insight might he share with us? Whatever could Thom blame that one on? Who can predict such a thing?

I’m telling you, you’ll need to do some breathing exercises, and perhaps a little quiet meditation, to prepare yourself for the careful nuance and devastating originality of Hartmann’s answer.

The S&L crisis was caused, he says, by…“deregulation.” (I’m as speechless as you are.)

Before Ronald Reagan and his crazy deregulation spree, you see, everything worked fine. Then Reagan was elected, and he repealed all the laws. Society practically reverted to barbarism. Everyone grew slightly hairier. Wolves ran free in the streets.

What actually happened was a little less cartoonish. First, so-called deregulation of the S&Ls began under Jimmy Carter, not Reagan. I say “so-called” because, as with most measures trumpeted as “deregulation,” it was nothing of the kind: all throughout the process of alleged deregulation, the S&Ls’ deposits continued to be covered under government deposit insurance. Deregulation means the removal of government involvement and control. Does this sound like the removal of government involvement and control to you? To the contrary, it gave us the worst of both worlds—though, naturally, Hartmann will blame the consequences on “deregulation” and “capitalism,” terms I doubt he could even define.

Under the government-established rules, the S&Ls could charge 6 percent on loans, and could offer depositors a mere 3 percent. Since most depositors had nowhere else to go, they had to content themselves with a miserable 3 percent return.

With the advent of the money-market mutual fund, ordinary people suddenly had the chance to earn higher returns, and began pulling their money out of S&Ls in droves. Consequently, the S&Ls wanted permission to offer higher interest returns for depositors, so “deregulation” allowed them to do so. Had the original government requirements remained in place, the S&Ls would have gone under then and there.

A consensus began to form that in order to save the S&Ls, their government-established loan and deposit interest-rate requirements, as well as the kind of loans they could make, had to be modified in light of the impossible conditions under which these institutions were forced to operate. The S&Ls needed to be permitted to engage in riskier investments than 30-year mortgages at 6 percent. (Notice: it’s the fault of the free market when the government modifies the government-established rules of a government-established institution, while its deposits continue to be guaranteed by the government. Got it?)

Maybe the S&Ls should have gone under in 1980. Perhaps they really did have an impossible business model. There is no non-arbitrary basis for deciding one way or the other, since the S&Ls were never genuinely subject to a market test. The government husbanded and cartelized the S&Ls, and stood ready to bail them out after that.

Thom Hartmann, meanwhile, looks at this situation and concludes that the problem was too much deregulation and too much capitalism. I am at a loss as to how to describe a person like this.

Hartmann also denounces the dreaded “Reagan tax cuts,” which were largely nullified by the Reagan tax increases and loophole closings. Tax revenues, in fact, rose substantially and consistently during the Reagan years, and you’d never know from Hartmann’s comments that the top 5 percent of earners now pay 60 percent of the costs of government. That’s not enough for Thom Hartmann, naturally, who never met a problem he didn’t think could be solved with more forced labor, which is what income taxation, stripped of the platitudes and propaganda, really is. (If you favor forced labor for the purpose of filling the coffers of our wise public servants, to be disbursed on behalf of society’s most vulnerable—since that’s our politicians’ number-one concern, don’t you know—then that makes you a “progressive” like ol’ Thom.)

Then comes the inevitable post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: the American economy was strong back when the top income tax rate was 90 percent, so therefore high marginal income tax rates are great for the economy! How does Hartmann know that American prosperity didn’t occur in spite of, rather than because of, those high rates? Without the help of economic theory, which Hartmann seems allergic to, how can we decide which of these possibilities is correct?

I genuinely wonder how someone like Hartmann thinks wealth is created. Nothing I can see indicates he’s given the matter much thought. The average person’s standard of living, he seems certain, occurs because we loot and shackle the wealthy, who are mere parasites on the backs of working people, the real engines of the economy.

Leaving aside the odd view that only manual laborers engage in “work,” all the brawn in the world could never have produced a steam engine or a Pentium processor. Only when informed by the knowledge of inventors and supplied with the capital saved by capitalists can the average laborer produce the tiniest fraction of what he is today accustomed to producing. The central ingredient in a laborer’s physical productivity is the equipment and machinery at his disposal. There is nothing natural or inevitable about the availability of this productivity-enhancing capital equipment. It comes from the wicked capitalists’ abstention from consumption, and the allocation of the unconsumed resources in capital investment. This process is the only way the general standard of living can possibly rise. Hartmann thinks it’s just swell to tax it.

The increases in the productivity of labor that additional capital makes possible, by increasing the overall amount of output and thereby increasing the ratio of consumers’ goods to the supply of labor, make prices lower relative to wage rates and thereby raise real wages. That’s why, in order to earn the money necessary to acquire a wide range of necessities, far fewer labor hours are necessary today than in the past—say, 1950 or 1900. Thanks to capital investment, which is what businesses engage in when their profits aren’t seized from them, our economy is far more physically productive than it used to be, and therefore consumer goods exist in far greater abundance and are correspondingly less dear than before.

American society, in short, would have been far wealthier and the material level of all people would have been dramatically higher had top income tax rates been lower throughout the twentieth century. Had government not seized so many resources to squander on consumption, those resources would have been available for investment that would have made the economy permanently capable of producing far more wealth than otherwise. Everyone’s standard of living would, as a result, have been far higher.

Hartmann gives no indication that he understands any of this. To the contrary, he seems to think (in addition to the egalitarian rationales he’d surely give for the seizure of some people’s property) the lack of government wealth redistribution yields the boom-bust business cycle! If wealth disparities caused the boom-bust cycle, we’d experience economic depressions everywhere in the world, constantly.

Hartmann’s argument runs, in effect: “Citizen, you need to be looted in order to stabilize the system [a nonsensical idea Hartmann came across in the popular Keynesianism that forms the entirety of his economic knowledge]. Let us hear no more anti-social talk about your so-called rights. All hail The System! Wherever would we be without the stabilizing power of violence!”

As for the nonsense about FDR’s New Deal “stabilizing us”—and the perverse argument that our economy will never be stable unless the people are violently expropriated—check out economist Robert P. Murphy’s new book The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal. Its playful title notwithstanding, this book mercilessly bludgeons thoughtless clichés like this.

At least the mafia has the decency not to put such transparently phony claims over on you. They’re honest: we’re taking your money because we have power, and you don’t.

What it all boils down to is this: one side of our political spectrum favors the central planning of Iraq, while the other favors the central planning of Americans. We can only hope for the continued growth of a third side, one that rejects as unworthy of a free people all the superstitious nonsense about the magical powers of our overlords, whether that power is exercised at home or abroad.

This essay is the first in a three-part symposium on the problem of sovereignty.

Even at this late date and with the term—like so many other words in our political lexicon – utterly corrupted, I still cling to the thought of myself as a conservative in areas other than politics. Murray Rothbard was always at pains to note that libertarianism was a political philosophy only, dealing exclusively with the proper use of violence in society, and as such had nothing to say about aesthetics, culture, sexual morality, or any other subject. That was why Rothbard rejected Frank Meyer’s “fusionism”: someone whose political philosophy is antistatist, regardless of his views on the spectrum of other issues of concern to conservatives, is a libertarian, period.

In politics, after several years in the wilderness, I am indeed a libertarian. That scandalizes some people, I know, even as it strikes me as a morally serious view. A glance at the 20th century, and at American history in particular, reveals no practical reason to be sanguine about the state—and I am referring to a state in this world, as it has come to exist in the West and around the world, and not as it exists in the pristine abstractions of those who continue to plead with me that this most destructive of institutions really can be made right.

We need government to uphold the norms of morality, I am told by people who specialize in the unintentionally funny. If the moral condition of society has reached a level at which we would look for relief to the kind of men who can succeed in a political system like ours, then the patient is terminal. On the other hand, had the churches not turned their attention these past 45 years to lettuce boycotts and excited pronouncements about the wondrous prospects of the modern world, they might have done more to arrest the moral decline for which we are now told we need the state.

Ron Paul, I need hardly add, is the honorable and unspoken exception to all the claims I make here. The Ron Paul phenomenon brought to light a great many people who are still capable of independent thought, and I think his Campaign for Liberty, with its Old Right statement of principles, holds genuine promise. Whether anything comes of political action or not, though, our goal should not be the hopeless one of erecting an improved structure on the ruins of the system. It must be to dismantle. Anything and everything, and as swiftly as possible. The more we roll back, the easier it will be for prosperity and civilized life to re-emerge.

Society has managed rather well without slavery, an institution that at one time was taken for granted by nearly everyone, and which many Christian thinkers thought could be purged of its worst abuses but probably never eradicated. I am likewise confident that individuals and communities would not only survive but flourish without being taxed and harassed by an apparatus of exploitation that does nothing but consume wealth and ruin people’s lives, here and around the world; that punishes what is excellent, productive, and decent; and that successfully propagandizes the public into blaming private scapegoats for problems government itself creates. That a supposed lack of regulation could seriously be proposed as the cause of the mortgage crisis was as predictable as it is idiotic.

A robust defense of this political position is a subject for another time. Right now, I’d like to take up a more fundamental question—who or what is sovereign?

Sovereignty, a modern notion, is a direct challenge to the decentralized political order of the Middle Ages. As proposed by Jean Bodin, sovereignty involves a social authority whose judgments and declarations necessarily override, and are immune to challenge by, those of any other sector of society. Associations below the level of the central government possess what privileges they have not by right but by the generosity of the sovereign.

We should not caricature Bodin’s views—a reading of his work reveals a strong sympathy for human associations between the individual and the state, a sympathy far less in evidence in the writing of later thinkers. Bodin also seeks to protect the household from the sovereign’s undue interference. These are important caveats.

Still, Bodin’s legal monism set the stage for the continued erosion in Western countries of competing sources of law and allegiance besides the central government. Robert Nisbet observes the clearly modern implications of Bodin’s work: “The political, rather than the religious or the economic power, is made foremost. Legal pluralism is replaced by legal monism. Only that authority is legally binding which stems from, or is countenanced by, the king.”

Nisbet’s work is of the greatest importance for conservatives and libertarians, and his book The Quest for Community, whose soporific title is most unfortunate, is on my list of the ten most important books for someone of our persuasion to read. Its argument is that “the single most decisive influence upon Western social organization has been the rise and development of the centralized territorial state.” Nisbet sets out to examine “the conflict between the central power of the political State and the whole set of functions and authorities contained in church, family, gild, and local community.” One of the book’s chapters is titled, appropriately enough, “The State as Revolution.”

Over the years I have had urged upon me, by friends and strangers alike, a great many visions of how political authority might be exercised in order best to safeguard what might loosely be described as conservative values. Each such blueprint accepts the modern notion of sovereignty, envisioning a leader (often a king) whose powers would have been unthinkable in the age of Christendom to which these armchair theorists aspire.

One such person boasted that his revived Christendom would feature a ruler endowed with the power—exercised in light of Christian principles, you understand—to redistribute “a nation’s wealth.” Even leaving aside the fact that “a nation’s wealth” is an evil, stupid, and question-begging phrase, any medieval king attempting to exercise such a power would have found himself either bloodied or on fire.

Medieval historian Norman Cantor describes the Middle Ages this way:

In the model of civil society, most good and important things take place below the level of the state: the family, the arts, learning, and science; business enterprise and technological progress. These are the work of individuals and groups, and the involvement of the state is remote and disengaged. It is the rule of law that screens out the state’s insatiable aggressiveness and corruption and gives freedom to civil society below the level of the state. It so happens that the medieval world was one in which men and women worked out their destinies with little or no involvement of the state most of the time.

It was in the Middle Ages, in fact, that the concept of federalism—which had failed to develop in the ancient world—first appeared in the West. Although he wrote in the early seventeenth century, Johannes Althusius was setting forth a medieval understanding of political organization when he wrote his book Politica Methodice Digesta, Atque Exemplis Sacris et Profanis Illustrata, or simply Politica. Its starting point is not an undifferentiated aggregate of individuals, and its ending point is not a sovereign who is logically and temporally prior to all subsidiary groups in society. Althusius defies both of these modern assumptions, which have informed the thought of so many of the political philosophers who came after Bodin (even if Bodin himself could be ambiguous on these points).

Althusius begins with the family, which he takes to be the fundamental political unit. Groups of families, he explains, may organize to form villages. Groups of villages and towns may organize to form provinces, which in turn may group together to form a kingdom or state. An empire, in turn, is composed of these various states along with free cities (which are directly answerable to the emperor). To the extent that Althusius believes in or employs the concept of sovereignty, he seems to imagine it residing in the symbiotic relation of all these lesser groups as they unite for a common purpose. The individual or group exercising political power at the highest level merely reflects this concord.

If the larger bodies are formed by the voluntary decisions of the lesser, it seems plausible that these smaller associations retain the power to withdraw from associations they freely joined. “Families, cities, and provinces existed by nature prior to realms, and gave birth to them,” Althusius writes. And if this is the case, then one could, without doing violence to the overall theory, conclude that sovereignty (to the extent we wish to make use of this concept) in the final analysis resides in the family, the primordial unit of the Althusian apparatus. Whether Althusius would have thought about the matter quite this way is not so clear, but the conceptual apparatus he uses makes such thinking plausible.

But whatever the ultimate locus of sovereignty, Althusius is quite clear about where it does not reside: in the ruling individual or group who happens to occupy the seat of power in a central government. The society he envisions is far too rich and variegated for a single power center to dominate all others.

The predatory modern state against which Althusius theorized corrupts everything it touches. Its centralization of power was directly responsible for the atrocities, domestic and international, of the twentieth century. That centralization was excused by the Left on the grounds that only a strong central authority could liberate individuals from the oppressions of lesser social authorities. It was welcomed by some on the Right who saw a convenient mechanism for overriding moral decisions it disapproved of on the part of local communities. Both sides got more than they bargained for. This Frankenstein monster, it turns out, creates far more oppressions than it liberates us from, and consistently distorts or undermines moral virtues from filial piety and thrift to personal responsibility and hard work. In the American case, its extravagance and irresponsibility have brought the country and indeed the world to the brink of economic catastrophe.

The genteel F.A. Hayek included a chapter in The Road to Serfdom (1944) called “Why the Worst Get on Top.” It helps to explain why, in a country as expansive as the United States, the two major parties can offer the American population nothing better than a choice between John McCain and Barack Obama. The incentive structure that emerges in the modern state rewards and privileges people like this. That’s a practical reason that any decent people who manage to succeed in American politics should limit their ambitions to shutting down whatever part of Leviathan they can, in order to restrict the scope of society’s worst over the rest of us.

Grandiose plans for society and the world brought into effect by the modern state – “national greatness conservatism,” in other words – have nothing to do with conservatism as historically understood. It is leftists rather than conservatives who have typically been unsatisfied with the prosaic pursuit of bourgeois life. As I wrote in a symposium for Modern Age last year, conservatives delight in and defend those finite but noble (and attainable) virtues we associate with hearth and home. That is all very mundane and uninteresting to those who would urge “greatness” upon us, but it is also much less utopian and yields far fewer corpses.

It was Don Livingston who first brought Althusius to my attention. It was also Don who shared with me the telling verse, “Who in fields Elysian would dwell, do but extend the boundaries of hell.”

Winston Churchill once described the Soviet Union as the only country in the world with an unpredictable past. It was an impressive racket, really, in which the official version of history changed in accordance with the political demands of the present. If something in the past discomfited the regime and its propaganda, then it never happened, or happened quite differently.

In our own country, teachers and ordinary citizens alike are expected to conform to the Official Version of our history. Book publishers, to be sure, do not conspire behind closed doors to come up with ways to enslave the American people to their government. But suppose they did, and American history textbooks were written for the express purpose of turning American students into zombies who mindlessly repeated government propaganda and believed the state existed to protect the common good. How would the books be any different?

For a maverick historian, though, an ossified Official History has a silver lining: he can make a career out of exposing and correcting it, or filling in the gaps that court historians choose to ignore. Until Bill Watkins’ 2004 volume Reclaiming the American Revolution, for instance, there had not been a single book on the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 in a hundred years—as scores of studies of every bit of useless trivia lined the shelves.

The figures and organizations Kauffman profiles do not fit into the received version of American history, in which only “leftists” who “hate America” might object to spending trillions of dollars feeding imperial ambition. The conservative John Randolph of Roanoke, who opposed the War of 1812, and Alexander Stephens, the Confederate vice president who had earlier opposed war with Mexico, are just two of the people discussed in Ain’t My America who refuse to fit themselves into the proper categories.

A strange omission from this book is the War Between the States, for if violently suppressing the peaceful secession of sovereign states does not smack of imperialism—especially in the context of the nation-building nineteenth century—then nothing does. The depiction of that war as glorious and righteous is a central ingredient in the current regime’s flattering portrayal of itself, and in the civic religion taught in the institutions of propaganda to which some still entrust their young. Robert E. Lee made the connection explicit, predicting that the “consolidation of the states into one vast republic” would produce an entity that was “sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home.” This should have been perfect grist for Kauffman’s mill.

The cross-ideological American Anti-Imperialist League, formed in the wake of the American acquisition of (among other territory) the Philippines following the Spanish-American War, is right up Kauffman’s alley. He gives us lively vignettes of its more colorful figures, such as the laissez-faire businessman Edward Atkinson, who asked the War Department for some addresses so he could send his antiwar pamphlets to the troops. Now once in a while the anti-imperialists are taken to task for their alleged lack of racial enlightenment (the pro-war forces, of course, being their usual models of toleration). This description of the anti-imperialists is not even accurate in the first place; Moorfield Storey, a leader of the NAACP, is one of many obvious counter-examples. But Kauffman, who is able to put such matters into perspective, suggests that mass murder may actually be a worse crime than racial insensitivity: “If neither side distinguished itself by the elevated moral standards of the twenty-first century, when all men are brothers and peace rules our planet, at least the anti-imperialists wanted to leave the Filipinos alone rather than conquer and slaughter them.”

Along the same lines Kauffman cites Sen. James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, who like most Americans at the time believed neither in integration nor racial equality but who sacrificed his career for the cause of peace as Woodrow Wilson was pushing his country into the Great War. His friends tried in vain to persuade him to support the president, but he would not budge. Losing his Senate seat was as nothing, he said, compared to the lives and liberties that Americans would lose if the country entered the war. In 1918 he was defeated for re-election by Democrat Pat Harrison—who, by the way, was pro-war and pro-segregation. (Wilson himself was not exactly known as a champion of the oppressed black man, but is still ranked among the “near great” presidents; taking the country to war evidently covers a multitude of sins.)

Vardaman, says Kauffman, “understood that standing athwart the empire would destroy his career.” How easy it would have been “to trim, to temporize, to dissemble, to quietly slip out of the peace camp and vote for Death. But to his eternal credit, he did not.” As he left the Senate, Vardaman called on the nations of the world to abolish conscription and to establish national referenda to decide on war.

That latter suggestion would reappear in the 1930s in the form of the Ludlow Amendment, a proposed constitutional amendment that would have required just such a referendum in the United States. I once favored that solution as a way to keep the war machine in check, and I suspect Kauffman does as well. I was talked out of it by the argument that if a war should actually be approved by such a vote (and in the weeks leading up to it the machinery of propaganda would whir like never before), the referendum would then become a potent rhetorical weapon in favor of the war. The war would have all the sanction it could need; and we’d never hear the end of all the people-have-spokens. The Ludlow Amendment, I suspect, would have been just another casualty of Donald Livingston’s observation that most efforts to limit the central government’s power usually wind up increasing it.

But if that proposal held more potential peril than promise, opponents of the warfare state in the 1930s possessed equal parts cleverness, cynicism, and dark humor. Kauffman reminds us of the Veterans of Future Wars, a group organized at Princeton University in 1936 that went on to boast 584 chapters around the country. Then there was the Association of Gold Star Mothers of Future Veterans, born at Vassar College, as well as the Foreign Correspondents of Future Wars, established at the City College of New York. This latter group proposed “to establish training courses for members of the association in the writing of atrocity stories and garbled war dispatches for patriotic purposes.” If only our own opposition to war and propaganda could be half as inspired.

Thanks to Ron Paul’s campaign the term “Taft Republican” is being tossed around once again, and Kauffman reintroduces us to the Ohio senator. Taft, known in his day as Mr. Republican, declared on the Senate floor in January 1951 that “the principal purpose of the foreign policy of the United States is to maintain the liberty of our people. … Its purpose is not to reform the entire world or spread sweetness and light and economic prosperity to peoples who have lived and worked out their own salvation for centuries, according to their customs, and to the best of their abilities.” Taft identified the second goal of American foreign policy as peace. Writes Kauffman: “Liberty and peace; with those two words, [Taft] had placed himself as far outside postwar discourse as one could reasonably stand.”

We are also treated to a sympathetic account of the anti-militarist side of Russell Kirk, whose seminal work The Conservative Mind became a revered text in the conservative canon. Among other things, Kirk was a staunch opponent of the first Persian Gulf War, writing privately to a friend that George H.W. Bush should be strung up on the White House lawn for war crimes. His lectures at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s decrying war and militarism were allowed, no doubt, only because the aging Kirk was considered too iconic not to be granted respect. Those speeches would never be permitted today, it hardly need be said, with war and bankruptcy now the most urgent conservative goals.

Kirk, who had earlier dismissed libertarians as “chirping sectaries,” praised them in the 1990s for having an “understanding of foreign policy that the elder Robert Taft represented.” That was a position he had long respected. In his 1951 biography of Randolph of Roanoke, Kirk spoke sympathetically of his subject’s aversion to war and expansionism, for men of “sturdy conservative convictions…were naturally lovers of tranquility and foes of aggression.” Skepticism of global intervention can also be found in 1954’s A Program for Conservatives, a fact the conservative establishment does not typically go out of its way to point out.

For whatever reason, Ron Paul barely registers in Ain’t My America—perhaps because, compared to the others featured here, he is already relatively well known. Kauffman instead interviews Congressman Jimmy Duncan (R-TN), who agrees with the Texas congressman that there was nothing conservative about the Iraq war. Duncan also has the crazy idea that the U.S. government might engage in too much military spending: “My goodness, we’re spending as much as all other countries of the world combined on defense spending—and they always want more.” This alone makes Duncan a “liberal,” according to the automatons.

Kauffman’s writing style is a perfect medium for transmitting the flavor of these times and the character of these men. The old republic practically courses through his veins, and the words flow effortlessly from his pen—even if they happen to be words like amaranthine, mephitic, esurient, and nepenthe. At times an understandable exasperation comes through. Thus: “War effaces and perverts everything that traditionalist conservatives profess. Every damn thing, from motherhood to the country church. And yet postwar conservatives, and especially the scowling ninnies of the Bush Right, revere war above all other values. It trumps the First Amendment; it razes the home; it decks the decalogue. And they don’t care.”

Nor do most Americans, if their voting patterns and apathy are any indication. “The American Century, alas, did not belong to the likes of Moorfield Storey, Murray Rothbard, or Russell Kirk,” Kauffman laments. “But the American soul does.”

I agree, or at least I want to. Ours is a great anti-colonial tradition, and our founders cautioned us about the perils of war and entangling alliances. Charles Pinckney warned his countrymen that global ambition was incompatible with republicanism. And the feisty individualism, the aversion to propaganda, and the plain-speaking common sense of the conservatives who populate Bill Kauffman’s book have a distinctly American flavor.

Yet one nagging argument just won’t go away: if this truly is the American soul, someone must have forgotten to tell the American people. William James, aghast at the colonial occupation of the Philippines that followed the Spanish-American War, declared that the U.S. had “puked up its ancient soul…in five minutes.” That soul, such as it is, has been sold time and again. And not to particularly high bidders, either: what people possessed of an antiwar, anti-imperial soul, that wishes only to do justice and pursue the ordinary things of life, could have been led into an immoral absurdity like the Iraq war?

With very rare exceptions, Kauffman observes, the American people have never really been presented with a choice for or against the empire. All too true – but are the people really blameless here? Some of their stupid electoral decisions may be the result of an ignorance for which they are not entirely responsible, but what remotely educated or even half-conscious living being could consider John McCain a fit candidate for anything?

I’m not entirely sure why the old America is so unpopular, though part of the reason is that few Americans have been allowed to discover it. When they do, many want to recover it. That’s why, if I were looking to transform a neoconservative into a normal human being, Ain’t My America would be one of the first books I’d hand him in my proselytizing mission.

Thomas E. Woods, Jr., is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including 33 Questions About American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask and, most recently, Sacred Then and Sacred Now: The Return of the Old Latin Mass.